from the magazine

Meet the Most Powerful Woman in Hollywood

In 2012, after more than three decades producing hits such as E.T., Jurassic Park, and Schindler’s List, Kathleen Kennedy was handpicked by George Lucas to head Lucasfilm. Now, with the smash success of The Force Awakens behind her, Kennedy sits down with Sarah Ellison to talk about her mentors, her sense of equality, and her vision for the Star Wars franchise.

Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm, photographed at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, England.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Kathleen Kennedy’s husband, the producer Frank Marshall, told me a story. Kennedy had grown up on Lake Shasta, in Northern California, and she and her two sisters spent much of their childhood playing on the water. In 1985, when Kennedy and Marshall were co-producing the movie The Color Purple, shot in rural North Carolina, several of the grips working on the film found a lake nearby and decided to go water-skiing. “All the guys are showing off and falling and skiing and falling,” Marshall recalled. Finally, after the boat returned to the dock, somebody asked Kennedy if she’d like to take a turn. She said, “O.K., I’ll give it a try,” Marshall remembered. The crew members started the engine and invited her into the boat, to take her out. Kennedy said, “No, I’ll just start from the dock here.” The request threw the crew members for a loop, but they obliged. The boat started up again and pulled her onto the water. Her skis skimmed the surface of the lake as she took a flawless turn around it, throwing up spray on the curves. As the boat returned to the dock, Kennedy let go of the rope and the momentum carried her right onto the shore—she finished as gracefully as she had started. “She never even got wet,” Marshall said. “After that, the grips never got back in the water.”

After more than three decades making some of the most successful movies of our time, Kathleen Kennedy has become something of an icon. She is perhaps the most powerful woman in Hollywood, but she does not talk much about what it is like being a female executive in a male-dominated industry. That is not her style. Nor is she self-deprecating. She prefers just to have people watch what she does. She is exceedingly uneasy about promoting her own story—unusual for Hollywood, where people rarely take less credit than they deserve.

The list of movies Kennedy has produced is impressive in both box office and prestige. It starts in 1982, with Steven Spielberg’s E.T. Her partnership with Spielberg runs through most of the Indiana Jones series (which was the brainchild of George Lucas), Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, and straight on to Lincoln, which was nominated for 12 Oscars and won 2. In collaboration with her husband or others, she has produced more than 60 movies, including Empire of the Sun, The Goonies, Alive, Young Sherlock Holmes, Cape Fear, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Bridges of Madison County. Together, her movies have earned more than 120 Oscar nominations. Now, with the release of The Force Awakens, which is already one of the most lucrative films in history, Kennedy has become the high priestess of the relaunched Star Wars enterprise. The new movie’s position as the first feminist Star Wars film—with Rey, the breakout female protagonist—only adds to the impression that Kennedy is, as the Star Wars screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan put it, a “secret superhero in training.”

With Frank Marshall while filming Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1980

From the Kennedy/Marshall Company.

“Cinephile Phase”

In November, before the release of The Force Awakens, I met with Kennedy in her office on the seventh floor of the main building on the Lucasfilm campus, in San Francisco’s Presidio park. Kennedy has shoulder-length brown hair and bright-blue eyes that are so vivid I wondered if she wore tinted contacts. (She does not.) Her spacious quarters are decorated in dark wood, Mission-style, and she displays photos of her daughters, now teenagers, when they were in grade school, dressed up as Princess Leia and Darth Vader. She unearthed the pictures when she started as the company’s new co-chair, in 2012. (The older girl is now in college and the younger one is finishing high school.) Her office is pristine, partly because she is barely there. She spends much of her time in London (where The Force Awakens was largely filmed, at Pinewood Studios, and where she and her husband currently live) between working trips to San Francisco (Lucasfilm’s headquarters) and Los Angeles (where the parent company, Disney, is based). Shooting big movies at Pinewood dates back to the early James Bond films.

Kennedy grew up in Redding, California. Her mother was active in the local theater, her father a judge. She has described her childhood as a time when she was given tremendous freedom. She attended San Diego State University, with a major in film and telecommunications, and, after graduating, worked behind a camera for a local news program. She told me that one of her earliest influences in film was David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai. In the course of mentioning her early inspirations—Truffaut, Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman—she also referred to being influenced by “Francis,” as in Francis Ford Coppola, today a close friend. Kennedy confessed to having looked down her nose at one of the biggest films of the era—Spielberg’s Jaws—which she regarded at the time as too lowbrow. “I was in my 70s cinephile phase,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s so insane.” Then, in 1977, she saw Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which persuaded her to go into the movie business. She got a job as an assistant to John Milius, who was then working as a producer for 1941, directed by Spielberg. Spielberg soon hired Kennedy away as his own assistant, and they worked together on Raiders of the Lost Ark, with George Lucas. It was a formative experience for all of them. For one thing, everyone came down with dysentery during filming in Tunisia. That’s why, Harrison Ford would later say, he argued for just shooting the evil master swordsman rather than engaging in a lengthy fight scene.

Kennedy and Marshall met during the making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which Marshall was producing. “Steven asked us to build a couple of models, to figure out the truck-chase scene,” Marshall told me. Kennedy offered that she liked to build things. “And we spent a whole weekend making jeeps and tanks and trucks, and I thought, Huh, I think I’m in love!” The pair went on to form Amblin Entertainment with Spielberg in 1982.

The next movie Spielberg and Kennedy worked on was E.T. Kennedy was 29. “Steven, after Raiders, had said, ‘You know what? I think you’re ready—why don’t you produce this?,’ ” she recalled. She said yes on the spot: “I was a kid—I had no idea what I was doing.” By now, Kennedy and Marshall had started dating, but they kept their relationship secret, partly at Marshall’s suggestion: he didn’t want to complicate Kennedy’s position as a young producer. “Don’t tell anyone we’re going out,” Marshall told her. “They’ll think that’s why you got the job.” Eventually, Lucas spotted them having dinner together and, according to Kennedy, “told everybody.” Kennedy already had enough to deal with producing her first film. “I got into it, and I realized it was nothing I knew,” she told me. “I was truly overwhelmed.” She didn’t show it, keeping everything bottled up until the weekends, when “I’d just literally be physically sick, I was so nervous.”

She and Marshall and Spielberg went on a tear, producing a string of successful films at Amblin, including Gremlins, Back to the Future, and The Color Purple. Kennedy and Marshall also got married; one of the few people from outside their families to attend the wedding, in Italy, was George Lucas. In 1992 they went on to form their own production company, Kennedy/Marshall. It has produced The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Bourne Identity, and Seabiscuit. In 2015, Marshall was a producer of Jurassic World, which was a box-office hit both domestically—just shy of Titanic—and globally. All told, Marshall and Kennedy had quite a year, helping to push worldwide box-office figures to $38 billion, the highest ever.

I asked Kennedy about an observation I’ve heard about her from various people, who make reference to a career surrounded by powerful men—Spielberg, Lucas, her own husband—and then note the novelty of her now being the one in charge. She looked ever so mildly annoyed, and then responded that she didn’t entirely understand the question. “You know, I met all these guys when they were big, powerful guys,” she said, setting the words “big, powerful” in air quotes. “The great thing is, at whatever point they decided they were powerful, they always empowered me. So I never felt like I was in the midst of something that wasn’t a balanced relationship.” In the words of Harrison Ford, who counts her among his close family friends, “She’s tough, so she can both take it and dish it out, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.”

Outside of Hollywood, Kennedy has remained a relative unknown. “I have loved being pretty anonymous, you know,” Kennedy said. “There’s nothing I like more than to have one of our movies run, and then I go to the ladies’ room and listen to everybody talk about it. No one has any idea who I am.” She acknowledged that her days of lurking unrecognized in the ladies’ room are probably over.

Steven Spielberg and Kennedy accompanied by a very sick triceratops on the set of Jurassic Park, 1992.

A Call from George

Kennedy’s attachment to a behind-the-scenes role may have been why, back in 2012, as she was wrapping Lincoln, she thought the call from her friend George Lucas was simply to catch up. It wasn’t. In New York, over lunch, he told her he supposed she had heard that he was thinking of stepping aside from his role as head of Lucasfilm. “Actually, I hadn’t,” Kennedy told me, “so I was surprised by that. And part of me didn’t really quite believe him.” He said that he had been thinking of people who could replace him. She thought he was asking her for suggestions. The job carried tremendous responsibility. Not only would whoever he picked to succeed him inherit the responsibility for all things Star Wars, but he or she would also be running the storied special-effects shop Lucas had created, called Industrial Light & Magic, as well as the Camelot-like postproduction facility, Skywalker Ranch, in the hills of Marin County. Recalling the lunch, Kennedy continued, “I started to mention a couple of people, and he immediately said, ‘No, no, no. I’m thinking about you doing this.’ ” She was taken aback but quickly came around. “You know, George, I actually might really be interested in that,” she remembered telling him. To me she said, “I immediately felt this sense of responsibility. And sort of a feeling that I wanted to do this for him as well as myself, because I knew how important it was to him.” I asked her why she had turned down other studio positions in the past. Had she felt daunted? She shook her head and smiled conspiratorially: “I knew enough people in those jobs to know I wouldn’t be happy in those jobs.”

She agreed to take the reins at Lucasfilm. A few months later, before she could fully settle in, Lucas spoke to her about a possible sale to Disney. “He started to lay out what he was thinking,” Kennedy told me. “When he laid it out, he wasn’t talking about doing something immediate. It was a kind of ‘Down the road, this is something I’ve been thinking of.’ And it was interesting that Disney was always his first choice.” As it happened, the decision wasn’t down the road at all. Within a few months, Lucas announced the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney for $4 billion.

The transition has worked. This is in part because Lucas had carefully handpicked both his successor and his buyer, and also because Bob Iger, the chairman and C.E.O. of Disney, believes in preserving the culture of the companies he acquires. In terms of personal style, the change from Lucas to Kennedy could not have been more stark. Lucas was a beloved and oddly vulnerable figure in the minds of his employees. Until he chose Kennedy to replace him, no one who worked for Lucas thought there was ever going to be another Star Wars movie; he was bruised and bitter after Episodes I, II, and III, the so-called prequels, had been widely panned. Lucrative as the franchise and its merchandising continued to be, without a big Star Wars movie in the works, Lucasfilm lacked its primary reason for being. Nobody ever questioned Lucas—in fact, nobody made a move without him. “I think this company, for a long time, was driven by waiting to see what George wanted to do,” Kennedy told me. “I don’t run this company that way. People aren’t sitting around waiting to see what Kathy wants to do.” As she views it, her staff looks to her for guidance, but they feel more empowered to act without her explicit approval. That said, Kennedy is someone who knows how to set a goal. This is a woman who, in 1989, at the age of 36, won the U.S. nationals for her age class in the javelin, only a few months after taking up the sport. As soon as Kennedy was hired, staffers saw it as a sign that there was going to be another Star Wars film: Kennedy was a consummate moviemaker.

Behind the scenes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with George Lucas and Marshall, 1983.

Trusting Your Characters

I asked Kennedy if she missed anything about her former life, when she was running her own production company with her husband. In addition to Spielberg’s movies, she and Marshall have undertaken some especially challenging and imaginative projects: they produced Persepolis, a $7 million picture based on a graphic novel about a young girl’s upbringing in Iran, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an adaptation of the memoir by a former editor of French Elle, who had been paralyzed by a stroke and suffered from “locked-in syndrome,” which allowed him to communicate only by blinking his left eye. She paused for a moment. “I suppose the thing that I think about every now and then, that I miss, is: I love writers.” In particular she mentioned Tony Kushner, who wrote the play and the screen adaptation of Angels in America. Kushner also worked with Kennedy on Munich and Lincoln. She said, “To sit and talk ideas with Tony—to, you know, explore lots of different areas we could go—it’s such a constant education. That is thrilling. And so the only thing I suppose I can do is try to get Tony Kushner to write a Star Wars movie.” Kennedy laughed. “There are times I think about that.”

Kushner told me he was “a little shocked” when Kennedy said she was going to take the Lucasfilm job. Kennedy is known for creating and nurturing complex characters in her movies—people such as the Israeli assassin in Munich, played by Eric Bana, and Daniel Day-Lewis’s flawed and all-too-human Lincoln. What was she doing running a science-fiction empire? This past summer, his fears were allayed when he and Kennedy had a conversation about the development of some of the scripts for current and future Star Wars movies. “She talked about the way in which the conventional approach to these things is that a script starts from an outline, and that’s what everybody focuses on before there’s a word of dialogue.” In Kushner’s recollection, Kennedy was urging the writers to turn their focus to the characters. She kept saying to them, “Who are these people? I don’t know who these people are.” Kushner felt that “she was expressing an impatience about character being secondary to story line, which violated something very essential for her.”

He went on: “We had an interesting conversation about how a lot of playwrights start with outlines because it gives you something to hold on to, but that you know the characters are likely to derail the outline once they start doing what they do.” He and Kennedy talked about how “there’s no telling what will happen once you have invented a person. They may be willing to do what the outline says to do, but they may have very different plans in mind.” The sense Kushner got was that Kennedy “was pushing people to be unafraid of being lost for a while. It was good to see her holding the banner of complexity in the middle of this huge enterprise of Star Wars.” The machines, in other words, have not won.

Kennedy told me that, while she’s excited about the future of the movie business, “a lot of these big movies are just a collection or a montage of big set pieces. And there is, in some cases, this feeling of: ‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter if there’s a central spine to the storytelling. As long as we keep it moving—and the effects are huge and it’s loud and the music’s great and the locations are fantastic—it’s all going to wash over the audience.’ ” She calls the result of such assumptions “disposable filmmaking.”

Kennedy has already made directorial choices that showcase her desire for an unconventional approach. While J. J. Abrams, the director of The Force Awakens, had already directed two Star Trek movies and had created the television series Lost, Kennedy is looking at less established directors for future episodes of the saga. Everyone I spoke to at Lucasfilm was talking up Rian Johnson, the director of the next Star Wars movie, the eighth. Johnson was previously best known for directing the 2005 noir indie hit, Brick, starring a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who tries to solve his ex-girlfriend’s disappearance by infiltrating a crime gang. More recently, Johnson directed several episodes of Breaking Bad, including perhaps the best of the entire series, in which Walter White’s brother-in-law, Hank, is executed. Kennedy has also said she wants a woman to direct a Star Wars movie. More than half of her direct reports are women.

Referring to a notorious scene in Return of the Jedi, I asked Kennedy if she would ever have put Princess Leia in a golden bikini—the famous “slave Leia” costume that is embedded in the collective unconscious of legions of men who were adolescents in the 80s. “With a chain around her neck?,” Kennedy asked, arching an eyebrow and laughing. “I don’t think that would happen.” She quickly added that she didn’t think George Lucas would put her in that bikini today. Despite rumors, Disney is not banning the image from future Star Wars paraphernalia. Mellody Hobson, Lucas’s wife, said, “George is not apologetic about that bikini,” elaborating that he had said, “The one thing I know are boys.” Hobson went on: “He thinks that was a very important scene. He would probably do the same thing today. He is not apologetic at all.” A small statuette of the cast of Return of the Jedi, featuring Leia in her bikini, sits outside Kennedy’s office. She hasn’t taken it down.

Three Steps Ahead

Kennedy has known how to organize and manage since she was young. On a squad with boys, she was the quarterback for her middle-school football team. She and Marshall are buying and selling property all the time, at a level that would make them realtors if that was all they did. In 2010, they sold their Pacific Palisades home to Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson for $26 million. In 2013, Kennedy and Marshall bought a 1950s hacienda-style compound in Brentwood for $7.5 million, then flipped it for $8.6 million. Earlier last year they bought the late Golden Girls star Bea Arthur’s Brentwood home for $14.9 million. Josh Lowden, the general manager of Skywalker Sound, told me he has seen Kennedy display the “jujitsu move” of getting directors and other movie executives to “shift their perspective in the direction where things need to move” without ever issuing a top-down directive. “I think she is always planning out three steps ahead,” Lowden added. “Kathy could run a bank or the U.N. or be president if she wanted.” Cate Blanchett likened Kennedy to a water diviner: “She knows instinctively where to put her energies.” Blanchett told me about the support Kennedy offered her on the set of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. “She’s the most acute listener I’ve ever met. I’d sometimes catch her eye after a take, and she’d nod, almost imperceptibly. Her quiet vote of confidence spurred me on.” When, during the filming of The Force Awakens at Pinewood Studios, a mock-up of the spaceship Millennium Falcon fell on Harrison Ford and broke a bone in his left leg, Ford was initially transferred to the nearest trauma hospital, in Oxford. He told me he had a good experience there, but that he was anxious to get closer to London and also to a hospital room that had an en suite bathroom instead of one down the hall. He credits Kennedy with transferring him to the King Edward VII Hospital, in London, which serves the royal family. “It not only had a bathroom en suite, but it also had a wine list,” Ford told me. “That’s my kind of hospital.”

I asked Kennedy if she ever got as nervous these days as she had when she was making E.T. In addition to the first new Star Wars film, she has two others on the burner—and a rabid and judgmental fan base. “No, no, no,” she insisted. It’s not that she doesn’t care about the outcome. She knows the stakes. During the filming of The Force Awakens, Bob Iger asked to review the daily reels from the set. “My phone would ring in London, and he’d be giving me his notes on the dailies he just looked at.” She acknowledged that he was interested in the movie for all kinds of typical business reasons. He has often referred, somewhat pointedly, to The Force Awakens as a $4 billion movie, the value of it being as much as the entire purchase price of Lucasfilm. “My involvement in this film is unusual,” Iger said, “but it’s unusual for a very obvious reason.” But there’s actually another reason for his close attention: he’s a fan. “What I love about this film,” Iger told me, “is that J.J. and Kathy hit a perfect balance between legacy and innovation.” Although Lucas has shown ambivalence about loss of control over the Star Wars characters he created, Kennedy told me that “he also couldn’t be more thrilled with the directors we’ve hired and the direction we’re headed.”

If there’s one thing that Kennedy seems to be constitutionally incapable of experiencing, it’s angst. After more than 30 years in the business, Kennedy has learned what she needs to be worried about and what she can let go. She brought up a line in Spielberg’s recent movie, Bridge of Spies, in which Tom Hanks, playing a lawyer, asks the accused foreign agent, played by Mark Rylance, “Are you worried?” And Rylance replies, “Would it help?” Kennedy added, “It’s like my mantra.”